Data Analysis: How Close Is Pioneer on Arena?

It's been eleven weeks, almost three months, since Wizards appeased a community up in arms with their announcement of Pioneer coming to Arena. If we wanted to be a little mean, we could also say it's been 32 months, as this wasn't the first time we got this promise. The earliest statement on working toward Pioneer I was able to find dates back to November 2019. These original plans were put on permanent hold one year ago, but not before being confirmed and concretized over and over in the intervening months.

If we don't want to be mean, however, we must acknowledge that their most recent announcement did its best to temper expectations. Wizards made it clear that for now we have to make do with the Pioneer cards already on Arena anyway, in a placeholder format called Explorer. We were told to "consider this the first leg of our Pioneer journey," that supporting Pioneer "will take several years to accomplish," and that, even then, we shouldn't expect the full card pool but just "all the cards that matter."

On the other hand, it doesn't take a particularly mean observer to raise an eyebrow at the fact that, within a 36-day stretch alone, Arena can add 405 cards in support of Alchemy, with a total text exceeding 15,000 words. It's nice knowing that the programmers got time for this. Okay, the previous sentence may be steeped in petty sarcasm, but the following isn't. It is nice to know that the Arena team has the resources to implement so many cards that break the rules of Magic. Because now they can't claim it's too hard to program , or purport problems with , which doesn't exist on the client yet. (Still petty. But no sarcasm!)

What tastes equal parts bitter and sweet is the fruit of knowing how close Pioneer could be if they stopped wasting their efforts on six-sided Alchemy abominations no one knew anyone wanted and instead focused on delivering the goods so many people are clamoring for. Because the cards necessary to give us a reasonable approximation of Pioneer paper play only number in the dozens, a mere fraction of the current Alchemy output.

"All the Cards That Matter"

According to Scryfall, there are 3,247 cards legal in Pioneer but not legal in Explorer today. By the time you're reading this, the number may already be down, which forces us to admit that, actually, Alchemy Horizons: Baldur's Gate does have one good thing to it, after all, even if it's just one card and the card in question is .

In fact, this Eye should draw our eye to the more relevant question of how many of these cards appear in relevant decks. To find out I looked at all the published decks from the six most recent Pioneer Challenges on Magic Online at the time of writing. This amounts to 192 decks played to a positive record in a meaningfully competitive setting between June 11 and June 26. If I had gone further back, I would have found massive evidence of two additional cards that also aren't legal in Explorer now: and . Banned in Pioneer and unlikely to come back, it makes sense to exclude them, and not just them. The decks built around them and the decks built against them don't necessarily tell us much about the current state of the format.

I ignored lands, except those essential to a strategy, meaning and . I ignored sideboards too as their contents aren't typically part of what makes a deck functional, more bonus than bone and easier to replace. Finally, it is possible that I left out cards because I simply didn't notice them as missing pieces. In part because Wizards' own Gatherer persists in a staunch denial of most everything that has to do with Arena, acting as the vigilante hero we deserve more than the hero we need, it isn't trivial to cross-reference decklists published by Wizards with a database of Explorer legality. To identify cards not on Arena I mainly relied on human intelligence, namely my own, or, as may be the case, lack thereof.

Anyway. Here are my results:

This might look like a huge, unwieldy list at first. But reality check: what you see above is 53 cards. Pioneer's metagame is decently diverse, but it isn't that diverse. A bigger factor and better explanation for why the number is this low may be the power creep of the late tens, early twenties, meaning: Most of the format's staples have been on Arena since their release.

Adding 53 cards is nothing, certainly not a task that should "take several years to accomplish." Notably, 53 isn't even twice the number of cards in Alchemy: New Capenna. If it were up to me, I'd bring all of these cards to Arena as soon as possible, and whatever cards show up in future Top 32s too.

However, we'd be remiss not to suggest a compromise when it doesn't much compromise the result. We can still lose a bunch of cards from this list without losing too much of the Pioneer experience.

Undercut

We should start trimming at the bottom, of course, which of course depends on the sorting. I sorted the table by Top 16 finishes because I consider these a superior indicator of a card's competitive relevance. Sorry, , , , , and , I'm afraid you'll have to go. It's theoretically nice to have a Bogles variant around, and I hope we'll eventually get around to the Armor in particular. But it's hardly a priority. Similar applies to the Abzan deck built around , which added , , and to the tally.

appeared in two lists, but I think we can live without it for now, especially as there's no lack of options among the rest of the decks. We can blame one of those for , by the way, an atypical inclusion easy to disregard. The ramp deck using , , , and likewise finds itself overshadowed by a superior strategy in the same space, so losing these cards isn't that painful. and more so as well as owe their presence to . Once again, it's a nice deck choice to have available but hardly a cornerstone of the format.

The most contentious question concerns Combo. On one hand, it's Pioneer's main, possibly sole example of a game plan without which Magic would be poorer, and this one at least used to be a cornerstone of the format. On the other hand, it isn't clear how many players would appreciate it, how well it would even work with Arena's timer system, and if it can ever be a major metagame factor again. Not least, it requires the addition of at least four cards all by itself. In the spirit of minimalism, I'm willing to cut , , , , and from my list of demands. But I can understand people who say that Pioneer without Lotus Field Combo isn't really Pioneer.

If we do agree to cut Lotus Field Combo, we might as well cut too. It appears in some other decks, but often as a one-of, and many could arguably switch to the far more common . Removing cards already mentioned and cleaning up some otherwise minor blips leaves the following:

These are 23 cards. If all 23 came to Arena, we could build 85 of the 96 main decks from our Top 16 sample, except for a few lands. That's 89%.

It's quite impossible to overstate the importance of this realization. The best we can do is to repeat it. Adding 23 cards to Explorer could take the format far more than half way toward Pioneer.

Further Adjustments

Data can only take us so far. In the interest of variety I'd rather add some cards not on this list, like the aforementioned or maybe the currently absent . Ignoring lands isn't entirely fair either. For instance, it's unclear how well the deck would hold up without .

To make up for it, I'd start by postponing . The monstrosity was a one-of in all 25 decks where it reared its heads. And only one main deck included more than two copies of . To my own surprise, I'd even be fine waiting on the table's top entry. may be a mainstay of Green Devotion and a frequent guest in the infrequent collaborations. But the former doesn't want more than two copies anyway and could fall back on any number of replacements.

The important takeaway is: Any player interested in Pioneer could come up with a list of 30 cards, the size of a regular Alchemy release, that would instantly transform Explorer into something close to the real deal. So, if anyone reading this is still playing on Arena, what's on your wish list?

And, if anyone reading this is working on Arena, what's taking you so long?

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, not of Cardmarket.